OpenOffice Moves Closer To Native Mac Version

March 19th, 2008 at 3:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

The OpenOffice.org Mac Porting team has announced the third development snapshot of its Aqua version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. The most recent version is still a "snapshot", not yet beta, and has many improvements However, the release still has some things that do not work correctly, and users are sternly warned that data loss could occur, and Time Machine should be used to recover any lost data.

Improvements include Aqua native print dialog, fixes to the file picker, copy and paste now working in the Hyperlink dialog and improved scrolling with a scroll wheel. Recent items in the Apple menu is now populated.

More of the snapshots will be coming soon, and OpenOffice 2.4.x will be the last release of OpenOffice that requires the X11 system to run on a Mac.

The conversion of the OpenOffice system to a native Mac OS X application has been in progress for many years and has been hampered by occasional politics, funding and manpower issues. Users have long been waiting for a native Mac version that doesnit require X11, and now itis on the way.